Anyone who answers “yes” to these two questions:

• Are you an individual?
• Do you own anything? (car, house, trampoline, ATV)

If “yes” to both, this means that most likely you could be held liable on a personal level if a coworker, neighbor, or even stranger found any reason at all to pursue a lawsuit.

What are you supposed to do with this personal liability hanging over your head? You might want to consider personal liability insurance. What is personal liability insurance?

Personal liability insurance: Insurance coverage that will protect you in all the areas that your homeowners, employers, and business insurance policies won’t.

Perhaps there’s a misunderstanding at work with an employee; maybe your neighbor’s child falls off your trampoline; maybe a buddy falls off your ATV and ends up paralyzed. No matter the situation, personal liability insurance is in place to help cover gaps in your traditional insurance coverage, minimize exposure and maximize peace of mind. And thanks to providers like XINSURANCE, personal liability insurance is now possible for you at work, at home, at play.

Accidents can happen, and so can seemingly innocent actions that cause unintended consequences. You may feel that your automobile, home, and professional insurance policies have you covered, but you’re still vulnerable to their exclusions and policy limits.

Here are examples of litigation scenarios:

• Giving a dog obedience school a bad review. Businesses that depend on their online reputations for customers are vulnerable to negative reviews. Many potential customers take these reviews at face value because they’re given by people just like them. Whether any individual review actually causes a loss of business doesn’t matter. If a business associates your bad review with their loss of business, it’s enough for some business owners to sue you. Even if they lose the case, you’re still out of the time and money put into defending yourself.
• Accidentally electrocuting someone. How is this possible? When someone enters your flooded basement that has the normal electrical appliances common to basements. Or someone goes for a swim in your pool with an old pump with electrical work that finally wears out. Or the third prong of one of your power outlets isn’t connected to the ground and someone plugs a defective appliance into it.
• Causing a chain-reaction car accident. Losing control of your car because of a tire blowout or other mechanical reasons can trigger a chain reaction accident in some circumstances. If the accident involves a tractor-trailer rig, the injuries and damage can escalate even further.
• An attractive nuisance injures a trespassing child. Examples of attractive nuisances include trampolines, treehouses, swimming pools, skateboard ramps, or a deep pit in your yard.
• Suppose you lived in a household with no toddlers or small children. Placing something like a decorative vase on top of a drawer seems harmless enough. While such a choice is perfectly reasonable in a household of adults and older teens, it could cause a tragic injury should a neighbor’s child climb the drawer and pull the vase down on himself.
• Someone falls in your home.  An injured back can end the career of a construction worker for example. Disfigurement can affect one’s personal life, career, quality of life, and can cause psychological scarring in some people. The damages awarded in court for these kinds of injuries could easily exceed your homeowners liability limits.

There are things that are usually not covered under your homeowners insurance policy that may surprise you.

• Pools and hot tubs are an ‘attractive nuisance,’ and even if they are safely fenced, some homeowner policies will not cover either one.
• Trampoline injuries aren’t covered by insurance. In fact, just having a trampoline on your property is reason enough for some companies not to insure you at all.
• Treehouses might be covered as an ‘accessory structure,’ but most providers will not cover them.
• High-risk dog breeds such as pit bulls might not be covered under many policies if they injure someone, even if the homeowner has liability coverage that protects against dog-related injuries.
• Stolen or destroyed cash over $1,000 isn’t covered.
• Sewer backups are not covered under water damage in an insurance policy. Water damage in policies refers to water line breaks, if your appliances overflow or leak, or if hail or the wind causes a hole in your home through which water enters and causes damage.
• Nuclear accidents are a standard exclusion.
• Sinkholes are ‘earth movement’ just like earthquakes, so insurance doesn’t cover them.

Specialized personal liability coverage added to your home insurance policy will ensure that your earthly establishment is fully covered.

What happens if you and your significant other are an unmarried couple? Then your partner and her children living with you aren’t covered in the homeowners liability insurance policy unless you include her as a named insured. However, many homeowners policies won’t allow this.

This leaves your partner vulnerable to all the liability risks that you are protected from. If she is an active person who is away from home a lot, and/or she has kids who are active and go to school, the liability possibilities are enormous. Consider these scenarios:

• Her child collides with another child with a bicycle, and the other child suffers a concussion. The parents then sue your partner for damages because her child was clearly at fault.
• She is mowing the lawn and a rock flung by the mower strikes a neighbor or damages the neighbor’s expensive vintage car.
• Her teenage son is playing baseball with some friends. One of his friends suffers a severe eye injury when struck in the face with one of his fastballs.
• Her dog wanders into your neighbor’s yard and bites his hand. He’s unable to work because he’s a construction worker and requires use of both hands. He sues your partner for the medical bills and for lost wages.
• Her son fires off a fourth of July rocket that sets fire to the dry brush next to a neighbor’s house. The hot brush fire soon ignites the house. She soon faces a lawsuit for extensive damage to your neighbor’s home.

The above examples should make it clear that such a huge personal liability gap needs to be addressed as soon as possible. XINSURANCE offers customized liability insurance solutions meant specifically for these kinds of gaps.

Drones can potentially injure people and damage property. Normally, your homeowner’s policy would cover liabilities resulting from building and flying model airplanes as it was done long before drone recreational use became popular.

However, drones have a tarnished reputation from the property damage, injuries, and invasion of privacy issues surrounding their use. They aren’t entirely what many insurers had in mind with their coverage of model airplanes or hobby aircraft. Even if drones aren’t explicitly excluded from a policy, the insurers may decide to deny coverage on the basis of how they define model airplanes.

One definition of a model airplane is that it does not carry people or cargo, that it remains within visual sight of its operator, and that it’s flown for recreational purposes. If a hobbyist is flying his drone beyond his line of sight via an installed camera, that may be sufficient for some insurers to deny the insured their liability coverage. This is a problem if someone is sued because he lost control of his drone and caused property damage or an injury. An injury that results in blindness or any disability that prevents someone from working will likely cause a lawsuit that incurs substantial damages.

Don’t assume your home insurance has you covered. The only way to know for certain, other than finding out after the fact, is to carefully look for coverage gaps.